RTÉ Radio One, Monday to Friday (Morning Ireland)
“Because we’re on camera now I can’t wave my arms about to indicate that I’m not sure what exactly is happening next so we have this code,” says Morning Ireland’s Cathal Mac Coille of life under the eye of the webcam. “I remove my glasses like this (he takes his spectacle from his face) and that is a signal to those outside the studio.” He replaces his glasses and smiles.
Mac Coille (58) seems like a serious man. Even his phone’s answering message (“I can’t deal with your call right now”) suggests a man on a mission. But this music lover, movie fan and hurling zealot is a different beast when he switches off. The trick is getting him to switch off. On his pre-dawn cycle into the RTÉ studio, the Dubliner’s already wired into work, listening to the BBC World Service though one earphone as he pedals downhill from his home on the north side of the city. That spin readies Mac Coille for the radio show that has woken up the nation since its first broadcast on November 5, 1984. Even then, according to the Irish Times of the day, Morning Ireland was making news. “It ran a few seconds past 9 am, before the second news bulletin, which meant the pips were not broadcast, some say for the first time in 20 years.”
We meet just after ten o’clock in the RTÉ canteen where the Morning Ireland team are downing coffee. “I operate better after breakfast,” says Mac Coille, who seems to operate pretty well on an empty stomach as well. Up since 4.30 am he is bright-eyed if somewhat disoriented after a hectic week in politics. Some 24 hours earlier he had returned to Dublin having anchored TG4’s marathon coverage of the General Election. Now it’s business as usual with a show that continues to make waves and top the ratings. In the recent JNLR/Ipsos MRBI survey, Morning Ireland not only retained its pole position but gained 23,000 listeners, moving it (at 449,000) ever closer to the magic half million mark.
Mac Coille has worked two stints on the show, from 1986 to 1990, before his second coming in 2001. It’s the azimuth of a distinguished career in print (assistant editor Sunday Tribune), TV and radio for a man who grew up in Clondalkin, on the southern fringes of Dublin city, into middle-class comfort. His mother is a teacher and his father, now deceased, was head of the National Archive as well as being involved in publishing and an accomplished editor. “I used to write a column for the Irish language newspaper, Foinse, and he would regularly ask me, ‘why use eighteen words when eight would have done?” Mac Coille studied History at UCD but it was a summer spent editing the Irish language magazine, Comhar, that determined his career. “Journalism is sometimes described as the perfect career for someone who can’t do anything else and I probably fit into that,” he says.
If he nominates the Good Friday Agreement as one of his memorable moments in the Morning Ireland cockpit, in recent times Mac Coille is best known for last year’s headline-spinning interview with a seemingly out-of-sorts Brian Cowen. “I deliberately decided not to get involved in the ensuing controversy,” he says of the interview with the Taoiseach. "I didn’t want to become part of the story."
Mac Coille is his own toughest critic, always wondering whether he could have done something better or asked that elusive question. “There’s half a million experts out there and I’m being serious when I say that,” he says. In any case people are not shy of telling him: hailing the cyclist at a traffic lights with suggestions or a thumbs-up. More often his distinctive voice gets him recognised – in the disembodied darkness of the cinema or that time his car got a double puncture on the lonely road home from Sligo. “It was late at night when I knocked on the door of this house where a woman happened to be living on her own. She told me to speak through the letterbox and then said, ‘you’re on the radio in the morning aren’t you? You’re Cathal Mac Coille’ Then she opened the door.”
Mac Coille, who looks years younger than his years, lives in Phibsborough with his wife, Ann. They have four children aged from 34 to 21, from Conall (economist) to Eoghan (English teacher in Japan) to Maev (on the staff of the Houses of Parliament, Westminster) and ‘baby’, Úna, a student of Italian and Classics. Every afternoon Mac Coille has a siesta or otherwise he wouldn’t be worth tuppence for the following morning’s show. “The most important asset you must bring into the studio is a brain that has had a proper amount of sleep,” he says. Despite his formidable knowledge of politics and public profile, he has never entertained the notion of running for political office? He shakes his head. “Nobody has every asked me, so there’s the first judgement,” he says. “And secondly I think they are right.”
